


Excelsior

by jerseydevious



Category: Batman (Comics)
Genre: Bipolar Disorder, Father-Son Relationship, Gen, Questionable Decisions Made All Around, Questionable Decisions Made Regarding Horse Ownership
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-05
Updated: 2019-06-07
Packaged: 2020-02-26 15:59:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 16,580
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18720322
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jerseydevious/pseuds/jerseydevious
Summary: Bruce buys Damian a horse. It spirals from there.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Hi everyone! I know this is a DC fic. I also know the DC fic is named after Stan Lee's catchphrase. You'll see.

It didn’t start with the horse, not technically. It started like any number of things, innocuous and vengeful but most of all, small—like the sickly taste at the back of the throat that comes before the sickness, or the smell of ice that comes before the storm. It grows and is nursed by lack of attention. But he didn’t notice anything before the horse,so, for the record, it started with the horse, and the horse started with Damian.

 

“Your mount is sickle-hocked, Drake,” Damian announced, nose turned in the air. Bruce deliberately kept his focus on the laptop in front of him. He wasn’t sure whether this would turn into a bitter verbal repartee or a screaming match or if it was nothing, and Bruce had too little faith in his sons.

 

“What does that even  _ mean,” _ Tim muttered, eyes never once leaving the TV screen. Too little faith, then. 

 

“The metatarsal cannon bone is beneath the horse, instead of in line with the hip. The artists failed to correctly represent a horse.”

 

Tim paused, briefly, to take a sip of the Mountain Dew, and Bruce could practically see the effort it was taking for Tim not to roll his eyes. Bruce appreciated the effort silently. “It’s  _ Legend of Zelda. _ I don’t care about what the horse looks like.” 

 

Out of the corner of his eye, Bruce saw Damian struggle for a response. A week ago he’d mentioned attempting to bond with Tim, and maybe Damian had taken it to heart; if so, there was something painful and endearing about the awkward way Damian was attempting to go about it. Bruce’s heart ached for him.

 

“What happens to a sickle-hocked horse?” he said, because he didn’t want to watch Damian stand there, fishing for something to say.

 

Damian’s eyes gleamed. “Allow me, Father.”

 

Damian settled himself on the armrest of Bruce’s chair, his warm slip of a shoulder resting against Bruce’s, and slid Bruce’s laptop onto his lap. He pulled up a picture of a few sad-looking, muddy horses.

 

“Sickle hocks cause extra strain on the hock joint, and inflammation of the tendons behind the hock joint. The angle can unbalance the stifle. The fetlock and hoof are similarly prone to issues, and arthritis is common.”

 

Damian flicked to another picture, this one of a white horse with her back legs bowed nearly to her middle. “Sickle hocks may be  _ preferred _ by select disciplines, but I think they are ultimately detrimental to the animal and the fact that breeders will breed sickle-hocked animals  _ anyway _ is completely inhumane.”

 

“You sound like a textbook,” Tim said, derisively. The music of the video game picked up, suddenly, and then the clicking of the buttons got more frantic. “No, no—don’t do that!”

 

Damian bristled. “At least I do productive things with my time instead of—”

 

“It’s alright,” Bruce interrupted. “I think you would make a good vet, Damian.”

 

Damian scrunched up his nose and saying, hotly, “Because  _ I  _ value the health of the animal over breeding for color. It’s a problem, here in America. You have so many  _ poorly _ bred horses.” His face didn’t betray a thing, but he sat up a little straighter. 

 

“What’s a good horse look like?” Bruce asked, and Damian’s gaze got sharp and mean-looking in the way it did when he was excited about something—it has always reminded Bruce of a cat, or a predator of some kind. Skilled and potentially lethal.

 

Damian took back the laptop and typed another query into the search bar. “Mustangs,” he said. “Human breeders can’t begin to compare with the constant natural pressure. There’s no room for poorly built horses. Mustangs are gorgeous.”

 

Damian tilted the laptop to show Bruce a few pictures, and Bruce wondered on the fact that he had never heard Damian refer to anything as ‘gorgeous’ before—he referred to things mostly in terms of skill, from  _ poor _ to  _ better _ to  _ best _ to  _ excellent.  _

 

The horse was not an impulse decision in and of itself. He’d been thinking for a good month on the subject, after Damian had held a conversation about it for an hour and a half. Damian had been raised around horses, it wasn’t a question of whether Damian could handle one. It would be a big responsibility, yes, but for a child who’d been responsible for defending his own life since he was three, responsibility was pathological—it was the shifting of responsibilities that was the concern. Horses required time, and effort. Batcow was content to sit in a field, as long as Damian came by to stroke her muzzle, milk her, refill the water trough and roll out her hay. But a horse would require training, and that meant time, and that meant time that Damian wasn’t Robin, and being Robin was something Damian was still willing to defend with blood. 

 

It would be better, safer, to ease Damian into the concept of it. To build up to it, so Damian wouldn’t make a snap assumption that Bruce wanted him out of the way, or that Bruce was looking to give Robin back to Tim—but of course, because that was a reasonable line of thinking, that was not what Bruce did. 

 

“Good morning, Mr. Carpenter. I understand you run an organization that gentles mustangs. I want to adopt one of your horses,” Bruce said pleasantly.

 

There was an incredulous noise. “Is that the reason you needed to call me a whole eight times inna row at four thirty-eight in the mornin? It’s before my cup a’joe. Ain’t many people call me this early for anythin’ less than a emergency.” The way he said ‘emergency’ sounded more like ‘ _ a- _ mergency’, and something about that, combined with the rambling speech, set Bruce on edge. 

 

“Yes. The Kiger yearling you have, the one born under your care. I want that one.”

 

“The Kiger?” Mr. Carpenter said. “Hold on just a minute, lemme wake up some, son.”

 

“I want the mustang,” Bruce said. 

 

“I’m ‘fraid that Kiger is mighty popular,” Mr. Carpenter said. “Kigers go fast. He’s got someone jonesin’ for a stud already, you’re fresh out of luck.”

 

“I’ll donate five thousand dollars to your organization.”

 

The man choked, presumably on his coffee, and there was a long minute of hacking before he said, “What the hell did you say your name was?”

 

“Bruce Wayne. I can go as high as you like.”

 

“Holy sh—holy smokes, holy smokes. Ah. Ah. The, uh, the five thousand’ll be just perfect.”

 

“I’ll have a man pick the stallion up within the week. I’ll wire you ten thousand directly after pick-up. Thank you for doing business with me, Mr. Carpenter.”

 

Mr. Carpenter choked again, and Bruce abruptly ended the call.

 

It briefly occurred to him after his morning mile and as he was easing through katas that he ought to have talked to Clark before making a snap purchase, and even more briefly it occurred to him the plan he’d created to introduce the idea to Damian without any serious repercussions. He considered it for about five minutes. Damian would adore a horse, especially one he saw himself in—Damian had a keenness for animal rehabilitation, and animal training was just a step up from that. They’d hire a trainer. They’d find a farrier. It was a good idea, just like Titus had been.

 

But Bruce did end up calling Clark, because he absently thought of it as he ignored a sandwich in favor of typing out repetitive emails to board members. He ignored the important looks Alfred was sending him, also. 

 

“I’ll be back,” he announced, pushing back his chair. 

 

“So he says,” Alfred sniped. He didn’t look up from his sewing—Alfred had had a conniption and a half earlier in the week about the costumes for a play at the local theater, insisting they were garish and unbecoming, and he’d taken upon himself to fix them. The sewing machine chugged along. Bruce stepped out into the grand foyer to ring Clark. 

 

“I bought a horse,” was the greeting. 

 

“Hello to you too,” Clark said. 

 

“A mustang yearling,” Bruce said. “Damian said something about how nature was the best breeder, or something to that effect. I bought him a horse. I was thinking I should let you take a look first, to make sure it’s actually well-bred. But I decided that was too long to wait.”

 

“The longest you would have waited is five minutes,” Clark said. There was a sound like he was chewing something, and there it was, the feeling that made Bruce grit his teeth. 

 

“Far too long,” Bruce said. He dropped the phone from his ear and sent the picture that he’d saved. “There it is.”

 

“You know that just because I grew up on a farm, it doesn’t mean I know everything there is to know about farm animals, right? We only owned a horse once, back when I was little, and she wasn’t a mustang. She was a big horse.”

 

“I know you spent a lot of time reading because you didn’t have friends and I’m sure a library in the middle of nowhere has something on horses.”

 

There was a pause. “I’m mad,” Clark said. 

 

“Hi mad, I’m right. Tell me about the horse.”

 

There was a brief burst of static—or just crackling from a foil bag of chips. “Downhill, wonky shoulder, but he’s a baby, Bruce. Nine bets outta ten he’ll grow outta all that and look completely different.”

 

Pacing. Why was he pacing? Bruce cut his heel to a dead stop. “Define downhill.”

 

“Yay, something you don’t know.”

 

“Just tell me what the hell downhill means,” Bruce snapped. 

 

Again, there was a pause, and for some reason the pause made Bruce irrationally angry. And then Clark said, “It just means the croup’s higher than the withers. That’s right normal in babies. Is there any reason you’re in such a bad mood today?”

 

Bruce threw the phone at the wall, watched it shatter, and marched up the great staircase. 

 

The kicker of it all, the thing that made it so goddamn funny, was that none of it was new. It happened. There was a list four miles long of—but of course these were not related incidents. They were things that happened. A rainstorm on a Thursday had no relation to a rainstorm on a Thursday two years later. 

 

So it was that early in the morning, a week later and an hour before dawn, Bruce pulled himself out of the Batcave’s lab after a few hours of chemical analysis of the space worm that had spent three hours drilling through San Francisco with an absolutely horrifying tunnel of teeth. Bruce had spent the greater part of the day collecting samples, and also marveling what looked like the mouth of hell—the teeth rotated, like a band of saws, and somehow the worm’s physiology allowed for that. 

 

But it wasn’t Bruce’s job to analyze the worm’s physiology no matter how interesting it looked, because only one person on the League had x-ray vision and a Fortress large enough to house the damn thing, and he’d been in enough of a sour mood with Clark that he loathed the idea of having to ask him for something. It fell to Bruce to do chemical analysis, because he was the only one present with something resembling a Masters in chemistry. It was, essentially, a Masters. It was information gathered from six different schools, under four different aliases, and he was never technically awarded a degree, but it was the equivalent of a Masters. 

 

He’d started his studies when he first left Gotham—contrary to popular belief, his training had not focused on martial arts. They had been an afterthought, when the idea of what he would do in Gotham took more solid form. Bruce had spent three years studying hard prior to learning how to fight—he flitted from college to college, learning only what he needed to study. Eventually books burned him out and he shifted to a more hands-on approach, involving only  _ some _ identity theft to work as a prison guard, watching autopsies through a small slip in a drop ceiling, learning survival skills and subsequently testing them in Alaskan winters and the Amazon jungle—there had been so much to absorb before even leaving the hemisphere. The closest he had come to any fighting discipline in that first year had been learning to box from Ted Grant; and he would never admit to Wildcat that the stumbling, skinny, sleepless eighteen-year-old with a good right hook but no idea how to use it had been  _ him. _

 

In the seven years he was gone, he remembered calling Alfred exactly once, in Belgium four years in—by day he’d be found studying every language in every book he could get his hands on, and by night he was honing what Ted had taught him in an underground fighting ring. It was where he learned one of the most important skills; how to fight dirty. It had served him well over the years because there was something about the cape and cowl that made people think he would always fight with honor. There was no honor in fighting at all, and since it was an honorless business Bruce saw no need to preoccupy himself with pretense. 

 

Every week in those years, Bruce felt he could count the hours he slept on one hand—he spent so little time sleeping that it was a wonder he was able to do anything at all, much less remember it. For some reason, though, those years were some of the sharpest in his mind, even if they weren’t what a person would call good years. They were clear and easy to recall in a way the year after he returned blurred and blanked. The one thing he remembered most clearly of that time was Alfred bleakly worrying that something in his time away had broken him, but Bruce couldn’t remember if he ever explained, ever said,  _ I’m just tired.  _

 

Bruce thought back on the skills he had worked so hard to master, and reached out for a skill he had failed to practice, to keep edged completely sharp—and that morning, after leaving the lab, he thought of precisely two. He went to the armory, pulled out a longbow, and slipped out of the Cave through the forest entrance.

 

What was fortunate about the Manor was that they were surrounded by forest, and they made a habit of feeding the deer—Alfred certainly wasn’t fond of them, but Damian loved to watch them. It didn’t take long to nail a mid-sized buck in the throat, and Bruce slung it over his shoulder and made his way back to the Cave. By the time he did, it was well past morning.

 

“Alfred said you’d—oh, holy fuck. Oh, what in the fresh fuck is—what the fuck are you, just as a genuine question?”

 

Bruce looked up. Jason was standing at the foot of the stairs, looking faintly disgusted—or faintly curious, Bruce couldn’t tell—wearing sweatpants and a red Gotham Knights hoodie. Over his curls was a Wonder Woman ballcap, which told Bruce Jason wasn’t returning from whatever undercover ops he pulled off these days. Whatever they were, there were a lot of them; Bruce’s current hunch was that Jason used being undercover as an excuse to avoid people and read alone at his apartment.

 

“I am gutting a deer,” Bruce said. 

 

“I didn’t ask  _ what _ you were doing, I asked the fuck  _ are _ you.” 

 

Bruce thought for a moment. “Hm. Busy. What do you need.”

 

Jason trotted over, steering clear of the blood-spattered gripped rubber mats beneath Bruce’s boots. “You know? I honestly forgot. I don’t remember. What the fuck, did Alfred want venison for dinner?”

 

Bruce cut open the deer’s stomach with a scalpel. “No, but that’s what we’re having. If you would consider having a point, please get to it.” 

 

There was a silence behind him. “Hey, I suddenly remembered what I came down here for. Here’s my question; what crawled up your ass and died, fucknut?”

 

Bruce turned to look over his shoulder, squinting. “Did you just call me a fucknut?”

 

Jason crossed his arms. “It’s what you’re being. My real point was that I lifted some Knights tickets off some lowlife jackass the other night, and I was wondering if you’d go to the game with me because they serve pulled pork at the stadium and it’s amazing.” 

 

Bruce swallowed hard. Something hot was blazing just under his heart. “Of course,” he ground out. 

 

“Don’t go sounding too excited, there.”

 

“No,” Bruce said. “It is… an honor.” 

 

He could feel the weight of Jason’s stare. “You’re just weird, you know that?”

 

“Yes.”

 

Jason took the stairs two at a time. At the top, he shouted down, “I’m stealing Dick’s Cheerios and feeding them to the birds and blaming you!” which was probably Jason’s way of saying  _ I love you,  _ but Bruce didn’t want to make assumptions.

 

The horse arrived around lunch. It was the same horse Bruce had entirely forgotten about buying, because the day he’d bought it also happened to be the day he’d driven down to the Blue Ridge to  install security measures on a house he’d purchased—it was something of a test round, for a new project he’d discussed with Clark. An open reserve house for any Leaguers who may need it, for whatever reason they may need it. And after installing security measures, he’d driven to a Chateau Morrisette and bought a few bottles of wine for Alfred, and after that he’d returned to the case of a man in Virginia Beach supplying arms to a dealer in Gotham City and carved  _ there’s nowhere you can hide  _ and a bat into the windshield of his car. If he were smart, he’d take the warning. The point was, Bruce had forgotten entirely about the horse.

 

Tim’s voice carried through the Cave intercom:  _ “Bruce! Why’s there a horse man with a horse outside!”  _

 

Bruce stripped off his elbow-length gloves and started down the stairs that separated the lab from the technical center, and slammed the red intercom button with his palm. “Because I bought a horse.” 

 

_ “Oh. Okay. What’s… what’s the horse for?” _

 

“Damian.”

 

_ “Why’s he getting a horse?” _

 

“Because he wanted one.” 

 

_ “Why’s he get one just because he wants it? What if I wanted a horse?” _

 

“Do you?”

 

A pause.  _ “Maybe, maybe not. Still. Why’s he getting one?” _   
  


“Care to take your brain-numbing questions somewhere else, please?”

 

_ “Fine, fine.” _ The intercom clicked off.

 

Bruce took the stairs two at a time. Tim was waiting behind the grandfather clock when Bruce swung it shut.    
  


“I thought about this a really long time,” Tim said. “A whole nineteen seconds, I counted. Can I have a goldfish?”

 

Bruce crossed to the door, and Tim trailed behind him. “You can have a goldfish if you can care for the goldfish.”

 

“Hey, why are you wearing a bloody apron to meet a man about a horse?” 

 

“I was dissecting a deer,” Bruce said.

 

Tim jogged to catch up. “Yeah, but why?”

 

“You are all of four feet tall and the most curious thing on the planet.” 

 

Behind him, Tim sniffed. “Well, you’re like a bajillion feet tall and your answers are about as straight as the letter ‘s’, I think—” 

 

Bruce cut him off by swinging open the front door and jogging down the front staircase, pasting on his best smile. It possibly looked odd, on a man clothed in a a bloody medical apron, thick clear goggles, and camouflage hunting gear beneath that. It must’ve been even odder for him to be trailed by a young man wearing a black-and-red tracksuit and a flat, exhausted expression. 

 

Bruce cupped Tim by the shoulder and pushed him forward. “This is my son, Tim. Tim, say hi to the man who brought us a horse.” 

 

“Uh,” the man said, adjusting his ballcap. “I just, uh, came to… drop ‘im off.” 

 

“I think you’ll find ten grand in your account,” Bruce said, with a wink and a squeeze to Tim’s shoulder. Tim laughed nervously. 

 

The man shifted back. “Where do you, uh, where do you want ‘im?”

 

“It’s a bit of a walk, but around the house there’s a dirt path that leads down to a barn just on the edge of the forest. Two paddocks on either side, can’t miss it. Actually, Tim, why don’t you show the lovely man where our lovely horse will be staying, you know where the barn is.” 

 

Tim sputtered. “Actually, I really don’t—”

 

Bruce clapped him on the back, turned, and took the stairs two at a time, sliding through the door. He cupped his hands and shouted, “Damian!” When there was no answer, he said, “Damn this house,” and turned on his heel towards the kitchens. 

 

In the kitchens, Jason was leaning against the counter with his hip, book in one hand and an apple in the other. Bruce snatched the apple out of Jason’s hand and took a bite before dropping it in Jason’s waiting grasp. 

 

“Where’s Damian,” Bruce asked, through his mouthful of apple. “I bought him a horse.” 

 

Jason looked at him curiously. “You drove him to Clark’s last night, didn’t you, because you called me on the way home to tell me that I have shitty taste in TV shows.” 

 

“I didn’t say that, I just said  _ Game of Thrones _ is overrated and not as good as you think it is.” 

Jason sighed. “Don’t tell me that while I’m reading fucking  _ A Song of Ice and Fire _ right in front of you, you have no manners. But my point stands. Will you tell Aquaman he reminds me of the guy who plays Khal Drogo?”

 

“If you’ll give me the rest of that apple.” 

 

Jason tossed it to him. “Done. What, you too busy committing deer murder to eat?”

 

Bruce took a bite of his apple. “Call Damian and tell him to come back right now, I need to talk to him.” 

 

Jason’s nose scrunched. “He’ll think you’re mad at him and be upset.” 

 

“Hn,” Bruce said, taking another bite. He now had to hold the apple with his thumb and forefinger, because it’d been whittled down almost to just the core. “Tell him his present is here, then. And it probably needs to eat, so he needs to come back now.” 

 

Jason pulled out his phone and handed it to Bruce. “Do it yourself, Ned just died.” 

 

“Password.” 

 

“One-two-three-three.”

 

Bruce scrolled through Jason’s contacts. “At what point did you get John Constantine’s phone number?”

 

Jason winced. “I don’t even think that’s his real number, I think he just carries a bunch of cell phones in his trench coat and leads everyone on. I was implicated in a zombie uprising by a ghost and he showed up, told me if it ever happened again to call him, and then pour goat’s blood on the ground to make a gateway for him to travel through.” 

 

“Don’t ever call John Constantine for anything, for any reason.”

  
  


“I got that vibe from him.”

 

Bruce tapped the contact that read  _ Satan Himself. _ “Damian,” he barked, when the phone picked up. “Your present is here.” 

 

_ “Father? Why are you calling from Todd’s phone? Tell Todd he is a liar and a cheat and I have no desire to speak with him ever again.”  _

 

“He beat you at rummy, son. It’s not the end of the world. Trust me, I—”

 

_ “—stop the end of the world, yes. Spare me your terrible humor. Did you say present?” _

 

Bruce nodded, although Damian couldn’t see him, and Jason snickered. “I did. Your present needs to eat. You’ve cared for horses before, right?”

 

_ “What kind of upbringing among the peasantry are you assuming I—did you say a horse.” _

 

“A yearling. A mustang, like you said you liked.” 

 

_ “Father… I… thank you, Father.”  _

 

“One day,” Bruce said, “you will call me your dad.” And then he lowered the phone and clicked it off, because Damian’s voice had gone high and tight, and Bruce himself felt a frog nestle in his throat.    
  


“You’re a big fuckin’ softie,” Jason said, grinning. “Can I have a polar bear? If I call you Dad, will you get me a polar bear?” 

 

“Go back to your fantasy Aquaman book,” Bruce growled. “Actually, don’t. Go pick up Damian. He likes your bike.” 

 

Jason’s brows furrowed. “Actually, he’s never been on my bike.” 

 

“Remember when I said I would repair it for you.” 

 

Jason pinched the bridge of his nose. “You and that little hellmonster took my bike for a fucking joyride, didn’t you. Fuck you both.”

 

Bruce reached over to ruffle Jason’s hair, and Jason leaned into the touch. “I knew you wouldn’t mind.” 

 

“What are you doing, if I’m picking up Damian?”

 

Bruce thought for a minute. “Africa,” he said, and then left, headed upstairs to pack a bag. 

 

It didn’t start with the horse, not technically. It started like any number of things, innocuous and vengeful but most of all, small—like the smell of water in the air before it rains, or the tickle in the chest before a cough. But he didn’t notice anything before the horse, so Bruce blamed it on the horse. 


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm.................... not gonna explain how Jason reconciled with the family in this. Jason canon is painful to touch, and poisonous to all Jerseys. Just accept it. Just accept it.

Bruce’s phone vibrated in his pocket and he pulled it out, tapping the answer button.  _ Twerp,  _ the caller ID read. “This isn’t exactly a good time.” 

 

_ “I think it’s a wonderful fucking time, actually,”  _ Dick snarled in a burst of phone static.  _ “Where the hell are you?” _

 

Bruce looked around him. The sky above him was a gorgeous blue, the sun was gleeful; mountains bared their white spines to the air around him, and below him, in the bowl of the valley, the grass and trees were a lush and rich green. “Pokhara,” he said. 

 

_ “I thought you were in Africa.”  _

 

“For two days.” 

 

Dick made a noise that Bruce figured was an aggravated sigh.  _ “Why the hell are you in Nepal?”  _

 

“Illegal parahawking.” 

 

_ “What the hell is—nevermind. Never-fucking-mind. Of course you’re breaking the law, somewhere. Bruce, I’ve got a bone to pick with you.” _

 

“Choose the stapes. It’s the smallest bone in the human body and I don’t have a lot of time.” 

 

_ “You are the most frustrating person on the planet. Okay. Do you have any idea how upset you’ve made Jason?” _

 

Bruce stopped, squinting. “Can you remind me of what I did,” he said. “I’m sure I did something.”

 

_ “It’s what you didn’t do, you unbelievable ass. You were supposed to go to a game with him, remember? He mentioned it two months ago. You never showed up, and now he’s upset, and you need to fix it. And don’t you dare tell him you didn’t show up because you wanted to go illegal parahawking in damn Pokhara.”  _

 

“A game,” Bruce repeated. He vaguely remembered it, maybe, but grasping at any memory in his brain was like keeping marbles on oiled glass. “A game?”

 

_ “Did… did you forget?” _ Dick asked. 

 

“Yes. I think I did,” Bruce said. 

 

_ “That’s not—that’s not normal. You don’t forget things, especially with Jason. You have a special calendar just for Jason-related things. I’m a little jealous of it, actually.”  _

 

Bruce worked his jaw. “Hold on momentarily.”   
  


Bruce dropped the phone to his side, turned to the man patiently waiting to strap him in, and punched him square across the face. He fell to the ground with a shout.  _ Why did I do that, _ he thought, dully, but the thought was far away and steeped in more oil. 

 

He raised the phone to his ear again. “What were you saying?”

 

_ “Who just cried out just now?”  _ Dick asked. 

 

“I punched a man.”

 

Dick sputtered.  _ “Okay, wait a fucking second—” _

 

Bruce hung up, because his parahawking guide was standing up with murder in his eyes and wiping the blood from his lips. The man unsheathed a wicked-looking knife from his boot. 

 

“Illegal parahawking should not be that dangerous.” Bruce raised his hands in surrender. In Nepali, he continued, “That punch was a mistake, I apologize. I’ll pay for your rearranged nose.” 

 

Then the man took his knife and lunged for Bruce’s middle. Bruce’s left forearm blocked the blow while his right smashed his open palm into the man’s face with a savage crunch; in a smooth, even movement he wrapped the man’s arm up and twisted it back until he howled and mumbled a curse in Nepali. 

 

Bruce slid several hundred dollars into the man’s breast pocket. “Actually, on second thought. The last time I had reason to be in the Himalayas, I had been gored by a bull two days prior. I was sneaking around. Possibly I deserved to be gored by a bull. Point being, it was a survivalist experience, and it’s been a while since I practiced one in the Himalayas. Care to stab me?”

 

“You,” the guide said, “are a crazy man.” 

 

Bruce nodded, a grim set to his mouth. “I get that a lot.” 

 

The knife slid home and, somehow, it scarcely hurt. The older he got, the duller pain seemed, to him; it was a universal constant in his life, spreading out from the dozens of breaks and fractures and gnarled scar tissue and replaced parts inside him. It seemed so perfectly banal. He kept one hand pressed to his gut while his guide scrambled away, disappearing back down the trail, and pulled his phone from his pocket. When he tapped  _ Twerp _ it left a bloody thumbprint behind. 

 

“Did Damian name the horse,” he asked. 

 

_ “I cannot fucking believe you,”  _ Dick replied.  _ “He did. Excelsior.”  _

 

“Excelsior?”

 

_ “Like Stan Lee. Damian likes Spider-Man a lot, we read it together.” _

 

Bruce grunted. “Onwards and upwards,” he said to himself, tilting his head back to look at the Himalayan peak stretching above him. “Onwards and upwards.” 

 

_ “You’re breathing a little hard. I’m assuming you were just in a fight, considering you punched a guy.”  _

 

“No, not really. Bit of a scuffle. I just asked my guide to stab me, with his exceptionally deadly knife. I didn’t realize illegal parahawking required the use of such weapons.”

 

_ “What?” _ Dick said.  _ “Hey, Bruce, can you say that again?” _

 

“I asked a man to stab me. Can you pay closer attention.”

 

There was silence for a moment.  _ “You’re off the fucking wall, Bruce.” _

 

“You’re off the fucking wall, Bruce,” Bruce repeated dryly. “What an odd sentence.”

 

_ “It’s not funny, asshole, it’s not—something’s wrong. Something’s really wrong with you. You asked someone to stab you, Bruce, that’s—”  _

 

Bruce clicked off the phone and replaced it in his pocket. He tore off one of his sleeves and bound the wound in his gut as tight as he possibly could, and then he started his ascent, picking his way through the rocks like the mountain goats who called these barren faces home. 

 

-

 

He swam to consciousness slowly. He didn’t remember falling asleep, or if he’d just passed out from blood loss, but it was probably good that he had; he hadn’t slept in nearly five days. 

 

“Jesus Christ, you actually  _ did  _ ask someone to stab you. You’re a wild animal.” 

 

Bruce glanced upwards. Two white lenses glared back at him, like stars. “Did you think I had lied,” Bruce rasped. “What are you doing here.” 

 

“I had Alfred activate your tracker. Just in time, too. C’mon, up, big guy, I can’t carry you.” A lithe arm slashed with blue looped under Bruce’s, and Bruce was hauled to his feet. He bit back a groan. 

 

“I didn’t ask for this,” he snarled. 

 

“Good to see you, too, Bruce.”

 

Bruce jerked away but a steel-strong arm held him close. “Let me go.” 

 

Robin _ —Nightwing  _ stared at him. “Do you want to walk up a mountain yourself?”

 

There were beetles crawling and crowing at the back of Bruce’s brain—a hum, like the moment before lightning struck, settled at the base of his neck. I’m going out of my mind, he thought, but the thought came from a distance away, over the white-bared spines of the mountains around him.

 

“You shouldn’t see me now. This isn’t good—this isn’t good,” Bruce mumbled. The words tumbled out of his mouth, too fast—too fast—too fast—

 

“What was that? Bruce, slow down.”

 

Bruce shoved Nightwing away, and Nightwing rolled gracefully with the motion, easing into a cautious crouch on the ground. He didn’t rise to his feet, only watched Bruce like a leopard waiting to go in for a kill.  _ Lethal  _ was the word for the way Dick moved.

 

He wondered, briefly, if this was what it was to be a bird of prey, to go so quickly while the world beneath you moved glacially slow—tectonically slow, changing by inches that you could cover in seconds.  _ I need to focus. I need to slow down. _ Bruce ripped off the makeshift bandage over his wound and dug his fingers, ripping at it with blunt nails. Pain tore through his gut _ —that’s more like it.  _ Nothing, in the end, compared to the pain of being broken into two separate and unequal parts, but a quiet dose of it. Funny that he would spend the rest of his life comparing each and every bump and bruise to the break in his spine. Bullet wounds were mosquito bites.

 

“Bruce,” Nightwing said, slowly. “I need you to stop.” 

 

“I can’t,” Bruce growled. 

 

No stopping—no stopping—it hadn’t been like this, before, had it? He’d been here, on this peak, before. Someone had opened one of his veins and let a live wire to it, surely—Bruce clawed at his skin with bloody nails. Onwards and upwards. Onwards and upwards. There was a point where even a bird stopped being able to bear the sky.

 

Nightwing pulled a pill from the casing around his forearms. “Brought this, just in case,” he said, by way of explanation. “Bruce, I’m going to give this to you. You’re going to swallow it. It’s a sedative, you should feel a little sleepy—and from the looks of it, you maybe need that. We’ll put a ski mask over your head. I’m going to walk with you back to the zeta point, and we’re going to have Martian Manhunter take us up to the Watchtower and then he’s going to send us back to the Cave.”

 

“I crashed a car in Harare,” Bruce said. Why was his mouth moving? What was he saying? “Intentionally. I don’t know why. What if I had killed someone, what if I had—”

 

“You didn’t,” Nightwing said. “Right?”

 

“No. I checked the records. Four times. The other man just had bruised ribs, but what if—”

 

Nightwing stood and approached Bruce like he was approaching a rabid dog. “I’m going to hand you the pill,” he said. “And you’re going to take it.” 

 

Bruce stumbled backwards. “Poison,” he said. Memories, unwanted, unbearable, flicked through his brain—so much poison, the only common denominator himself—

 

“Trust your Robin,” Nightwing said. 

 

Bruce eased despite himself. Something about the soft, smooth, comforting edges of that word. “Robin,” he repeated, and how good it felt to say.

 

“Yeah. Robin. Now take it, and c’mon, or we’ll freeze out here.” 

 

-

 

When Bruce awoke, he was in the Cave, and Cass had one of his arms wrapped up in hers. Her face was pressed against his bicep, her cheek squished against her nose in a way that made Bruce’s heart flip. Then, he remembered.

 

Bruce jerked upright. “I don’t remember this,” he said. “Cass?”

 

She looked up at him and nodded. She pressed a kiss to the underside of his elbow and released his arm, standing—she was still in costume, just with her hood pulled down. The yellow bat blazed on her chest. Guilt swirled in his stomach.    
  


“I left Gotham. I’m sorry.” 

 

“Fine,” she said. “Came back hurt. This, not fine.” 

 

“I’ll try harder next time. Teach me to dance.” 

 

She tilted her head at him. Her dark eyes thinned. “Came back hurt,” she repeated. 

 

“Just a stab wound,” he said. “I had a silver spoon childhood and I never learned to waltz properly. I’ve seen you practicing it with Steph. Teach me.” 

 

She raised a finger to her lips and jerked her head towards the staircase. 

 

“You should’ve alerted me he was awake, Miss Cassandra,” Alfred said. His tone was dry and rough, and Bruce knew, immediately, that the conversation he was about to have was a conversation he very much did not want to have. Alfred had been using that voice against him for decades, now, and even just hearing it made the guilt crawl up Bruce’s throat.

 

“New,” Cass said. 

 

Alfred stopped at the edge of the bed. He wasn’t wearing a jacket, and his shirtsleeves were rolled up, and his tie was untied and hanging loose around his shoulders. He looked exhausted. “Thank you for staying with him, my girl.” 

 

Cass rolled on the tips of her toes to give Alfred a kiss on the cheek (to which Alfred closed his eyes and a brief smile turned his lips) and then slipped off into the darkness.  _ Don’t leave me,  _ Bruce wanted to call out. 

 

“How much of that did you hear,” Bruce asked. 

 

Alfred’s gaze turned sharp and cold. “There will be no dancing. You’ve been here  _ six hours.  _ By all rights, you should not be awake yet.” 

 

“Can’t sleep,” Bruce answered. “Listen, I’m fine. I climbed half a mountain, the injury isn’t bothering me.” 

 

Alfred arched one brow perfectly. Bruce hated it when he did that—it always made him feel all of eleven, like he’d just come home from punching yet another boy at school. “Master Dick said you were in quite a state, when he arrived.” 

 

“I was tired. I’ve slept now, I’m fine. Let Cass come back.” 

 

“You are not  _ fine,”  _ Alfred hissed, gripping the rails of the bed until his knuckles were bloodless. “You are, in point of fact, nowhere near it. I’ve been tracking your spending. It is not normal for you to spend nearly half a million dollars on  _ houses in the countryside of Alaska _ over the course of two weeks. I will hear none your stubbornness this time, Master Bruce.”

 

Bruce’s mouth went dry. Had it been that much? “In my defense, I was drunk. And in Russia. It’s too cold to think there.” 

 

It had been a poorly-thought out venture, to try to drink the first man he met at the local bar under the table. But the urge had been profound—and Bruce had won, by an incredible margin. By the margin of nearly an entire bottle.

 

“That is also something you do not do,” Alfred said. “You have a very strict policy about drinking in public, a choice that I find particularly intelligent. You are not a man of excess, and, yet, here we are.”

 

“I spend seventy-five thousand in Vegas when I was seventeen, which you’re still mad about. I think you’re not exactly correct, here.”

 

Alfred was silent. “I think,” he said, smoothing the blankets down, “that these are potentially connected. And I think that these potentially connected events terrify you as much as they do myself, when you return to thinking clearly. Tell me. Those years you were without me. You have told me countless stories. You learned a great number of things. More than, I think, is physically possible.”

 

“You think I’m lying to you,” Bruce said, lowly, dangerously. 

 

“Allow me to finish, sir. More than, I think, is physically possible, unless you were in—an  _ elevated _ state. Where you slept little, and were constantly in need of action. With little to no impulse control.”

 

“I had impulse control,” Bruce said. 

 

Alfred tapped Bruce’s arm, right over round white scars. “You regaled me with the story of how you learned to wrestle Nile crocodiles and tape their jaws shut. I know you like to be prepared. But that is prepared to the point of obscenity.” 

 

Bruce jerked his arm away. “Point taken,” he muttered, because in truth, he had no clue why he had tried that. It hadn’t been for fun—there wasn’t secret joy to be found, in baiting and terrifying wild animals that only wanted to be left alone—it had been—something nameless. 

 

“This does not have to continue,” Alfred said. 

 

“Just get on with it,” Bruce snarled. 

 

Alfred crossed his arms. Silence reigned, heavy and all-consuming. “I think you should see a psychiatrist.”

 

Bruce laughed bitterly. “I always knew you secretly thought I was insane.” 

 

“Not insane, my boy,” Alfred said. “Bipolar. I think you are bipolar.” 

 

“No,” Bruce said. “That’s my answer. No. There’s nothing fucking wrong with me, Al.”

_ Except for everything wrong with you, _ Bruce’s brain supplied unhelpfully.

 

Alfred looked unsurprised, but something in him seemed to collapse, some hope. Bruce’s heart ached at the sight.  _ I take it back, I’ll go, I’ll do whatever, just don’t look like that,  _ Bruce wanted to say, but he kept his jaw clamped shut. Alfred sighed. “That is… precisely what I expected you to say.”

 

“Then you shouldn’t have mentioned it in the first place. Get out of here.”

 

Alfred reached out to pat his shoulder. Bruce pulled away, and Alfred’s hand hung there for a moment before dropping back to his side, and then Alfred retreated. Bruce sat there, staring at the ceiling, wondering if this is what it was to be a hideous monster; to be covered in long, barbed spines, that forced others to keep their distance unless they wanted to be shredded. He’d rather the world move so infinitely slow beneath him, that he be moving so infinitely fast he could never touch the ground beneath him, than to land only to find he was a beast that just kept drawing blood.

 

Bruce pushed himself out of the bed gingerly and moved to the bin where they all kept an extra set of clothing, and he changed into the sweatshirt and sweatpants he found there. Mentally he tried to calculate the furthest place he could possibly reach in one uninterrupted flight. A smudge of black barreled towards him, too fast for him to counter. 

 

“In bed!” Cass shrieked, snatching his arm. She used her bodyweight to try and tug him back towards the bed. It was fortunate, however, that Cass was barely a buck fifty soaking wet. 

 

“Cass,” he said, quietly. “Cass, sweetheart, I have to go.” 

 

Cass stared at him, and then slammed the side of her fist into his chest. “No,” she said, forcefully. “Bed. Everyone is scared. For you.” 

 

Bruce cupped her cheek. “Cass, now’s not the time—” 

 

That was when everything went black. He lived there, in that darkness, for only a few moments, before shouts swam through it, cutting it open.

 

“—you thought  _ head trauma _ was the answer!” 

 

“Leave!” Cass yelled. Her voice broke halfway through the word. 

 

Gentle fingers were prodding at his face. Bruce blinked his eyes several times. “That’s it, good morning, old man. See, Dick, he’s fine, stop yelling at Cass or she’ll give you head trauma, and I can promise you, _ you _ won’t be so fine. I know from experience.”

 

“Truth,” Cass said. 

 

“I’m sorry! I’m sorry!” Dick said. Through the blurriness of his vision, Bruce thought he saw Dick throwing up his hands. “Jay, is he really okay?”

 

“He’ll be back to asshole self in five minutes.” Jason’s hand ran through Bruce’s hair. Bruce, mindlessly, leaned into it. “In five minutes you’ll be back to the dickwad who abandons my offer of Knights tickets, tell ‘em.”

 

“Sorry,” Bruce mumbled. It came out more like  _ sur-ee, _ and it sounded like it was belched from the throat of a bullfrog.

 

A pair of feet pattered down the stairs. At the corner of Bruce’s vision, he could see Damian’s spiked hair, and then the light stabbed at his eyes so harshly he had to squeeze them shut. “What is the chaos,” Damian demanded. 

 

“Cass knocked Bruce out,” Dick said. 

 

_ “Tt.  _ He looks fine. Get up, Father.” 

 

Jason shifted so Bruce’s head was in his lap, his legs folded beneath Bruce’s shoulders. “It’s my healing touch. Give him a couple minutes, Cass hits like a one-lady freight train.”

 

“Thank you,” Cass said. 

 

“I’m sorry for yelling,” Dick said, again. “I am. I shouldn’t have reacted like that, Cass.” 

 

“Go  _ away,” _ Bruce bellowed, pressing his palms into his eyes. There was pain shooting from his temple and spreading through his skull like a crown fire. 

 

“Hello, Father,” Damian said. There was the sound of fabric shifting—Bruce forced his eyes to open, and found Damian a few inches from his face, staring directly at him like an owl. 

 

“Hi, son,” Bruce said. 

 

“When you can stand, you will visit Excelsior with me,” Damian said. His eyes searched Bruce’s face for a moment, and then he straightened, leaning into Dick’s side. Dick dropped a casual hand into Damian’s hair. 

 

Jason patted Bruce’s shoulder. “When you can stand, you won’t go to the Knights game with me, ‘cause you fuckin’ missed it.” 

 

“Jason,” Dick said, warningly. 

 

“M’sorry,” Bruce slurred. 

 

Cass pointed somewhere to the left. “Bucket,” she said, and Dick made a break for it. 

 

Jason sat Bruce up higher. “You’re in for a fun concussion. It’s karma. Y’know, for missing the—”

 

Damian sniffed. “Todd, if you complain one more time I will be forced to defeat you.” 

 

Dick darted in and slid a bucket beside Bruce. Bruce grabbed it and heaved bile into it, head pounding as if someone were taking a pickaxe to his temple.

 

“Sorry,” Cass said. “No leaving.”

 

“No leaving,” Bruce muttered. 

 

Damian made a noise of disapproval. “You just returned!” 

 

“Moment of… idiocy,” Bruce gasped out, before vomiting into the bucket again. The world was blurring and spinning too much to keep his eyes open, so he squeezed them shut, and for an idle moment he was proud of the power Cass could pack into a single hit, even if he had very little to do with it.

 

“You have those all the time, every day,” Jason said.

 

A curtain of hair tickled Bruce’s forehead—Cass, then. She pressed a kiss near where she’d struck him. “No leaving,” she said, again, somehow equally soft and equally forceful. 

 

“Yes,” he choked out.

 

“Cass, Damian,” Dick called out. “Head upstairs.”

 

Cass and Damian left. Bruce marveled, for a moment, at Dick’s easy authority—how much of a leader his eldest had become, how good he was at it. 

 

“Don’t tell me to leave,” Jason said. “Don’t you dare. I know something’s up, I’m not an idiot. I’m staying.” 

 

“I won’t fight you,” Dick said. “I actually need your help getting him up. I’m still sore from carrying him last time.” 

 

“Right here,” Bruce huffed. 

 

Jason snorted. “We’ve established you’re useless.” But he was rubbing circles into Bruce’s back, slowly, evenly. For a moment Bruce was so filled with love for him, for Dick, for the both of them that he could barely breathe—he was an idiot and a fool, for having left this behind. For nearly doing so again.

 

Jason pulled Bruce to his feet and walked him back to the cot, easing him onto it. “Eat less chocolate,” Jason advised, pulling the blanket over Bruce’s chest. “And sleep, Jesus. You look like you went and died.  _ Hah.” _

 

“Don’t joke about that,” Dick snapped. “We’ll lose him in time again, or some shit. Are you patrolling with us tonight?”

 

Jason was silent for a moment. Bruce opened one eye, only to find that Jason was looking down at him with an odd expression. “I’ll stay. Two can play the overprotective game, asshat.”

 

“I’m keeping Damian in tonight,” Dick said. “The city’s quiet. Me, Cass, Tim and Steph should be enough.” 

 

“You think he’ll take that well?”

 

“I think he’s been anxious for Bruce to get back.” 

 

Jason flicked Bruce on the knee. “Hear that? Don’t randomly abandon your son to go do dumb shit.” 

 

Bruce didn’t respond. Bruce was thinking.  _ Bipolar, _ Alfred had said.

 

“Keep watch over him, yeah?” Dick said. His voice was further away, closer to the staircase. “I’m going to find Alfred.”

 

There was a beat of silence. Then, “You know it’s kind of nice, Dick telling me to watch you,” Jason said. “Everyone and their dead grandma knows he’s like a mama bear when it comes to you. But I know he did it for your sake, not mine. ‘Cause you want us to get along so badly. Kinda bittersweet.”

 

“Hnh,” Bruce said. 

 

“You’re an ass, you know that? I had a whole bender, while you were gone. I stayed away from this place, I stayed at home and didn’t leave, I thought you didn’t want me anymore. Last night, Dick calls me in a panic, an’ he’s crying. You scared him. And he called me, of all people. I don’t know why he did that.” 

 

“He trusts you more than you think,” Bruce rasped. 

 

“Sure. Maybe. You know what I think it is?” 

 

“What.” 

 

“I think he wants me to understand you,” Jason said. “‘Cause sometimes, I just fucking don’t. I used to, really well, the way a Robin does. But you don’t make sense to me anymore. You’re  _ worse. _ Everything you do, there’s not a middle ground anymore. That’s fucking terrifying.”

 

Bruce opened his eyes. “Jason…”

 

“No, no, you’re gonna fucking listen to me,” Jason said, voice tense like he was about to cry. “You’re gonna fucking listen to me, because you’re scaring the hell out of everyone and they don’t deserve that.  _ I _ don’t deserve that. I’m not giving you a choice. My mom, she didn’t give a fuck about herself, in the end. She didn’t care. You? You  _ have _ to give a fuck about you, because you’ve got all of us, and this entire damn city depending on you. I’m not giving you a choice.  _ Fuck.” _

 

Jason’s face contorted like he was about to cry. Bruce pushed himself off the bed, cupped Jason’s cheeks, and pressed a kiss to his forehead. “Okay,” Bruce said. 

 

Jason buried himself in Bruce’s arms, his shoulders shaking with gasping, wet sobs. “Oh, sweetheart,” Bruce said, stroking Jason’s hair. “I didn’t realize.”

 

“You  _ never _ do,” Jason snarled against Bruce’s chest.

 

And Bruce sat there, holding his son, cut right to the bone. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So there's that


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi I apologize for being late

There was a painting of goldfish on the wall. 

 

There were three fish, in the painting. One was a cadmium red, furiously colored in the faint blue water around it; the scales were less painted in and more implied in the physicality, thick globs of orange-red smeared in little half-circles. The fish beneath it was a pale yellow, fins daintily floating about it. Of all of them it seemed the gentlest, moving sweetly and slowly. The last had large gold bauble-eyes that Bruce wanted to cut out with his penknife and shred with his fingers. Hadn’t Damian said something, about fancy goldfish and poor breeding—the fit his son would have, if he had to sit here and stare unethical animal husbandry in its face. Maybe Alfred was wrong. It certainly wasn’t impossible, rare as it was. They’d schedule an appointment with another doctor at another facility, one that didn’t mistreat its theoretical, artistic goldfish. 

 

“Sir,” the clerk at the desk called, nervously. Bruce wasn’t particularly sure why he was nervous. There was no one else in the room, they weren’t busy. Perhaps his bosses were abusive people, ones that Bruce didn’t want to give his money to, perhaps they should be tearing out of the parking lot by now. “You have to fill out the paperwork.” 

 

Bruce jerked away from the painting, staring at the curly-haired man—boy, really, and who hired children that young—behind the desk, looking at him curiously. He forced his jaw to move. “Of course,” he said. The words came out like dry kindling cracking in a fire. 

 

The pen was bolted to a clipboard. What a paranoid organization, thinking he was going to up and run off with their pens. A little trust would go a long way.  _ How many hours do you sleep a night,  _ the paper asked him, showing a scale of one to ten to the right. Bruce hesitated and circled the number eight, which felt like a nice, safe, average number, one with a good shape and a good countenance. It wasn’t really wrong, either. He slept around eight hours a night, on the nights he slept. 

 

When they’d pulled in, Alfred had put the car in park and looked at Bruce from the driver’s seat with uncanny knowing. “They will ask you questions,” he’d said. “And you will answer them honestly. I do not care how long it takes for you to answer a question honestly. I will sit here all day, if necessary. But you _ will  _ do so.” 

 

Bruce scribbled through the circle around the number eight. The pen hovered next around the number three; in his head, he calculated the average of days he went without sleeping, and figured the average number of hours he slept when he did. After a second he circled the number two and wrote in a decimal point, then another two and a four. It couldn’t hurt to be accurate. Why did you feel the need to add unnecessary information, the good doctor would ask him, so Bruce scribbled out his decimals and ripped the paper into small, unreadable pieces, and tossed the flurry into the trashcan beside him. He got up, asked the desk for another paper (the boy was looking more bemused, by now) and sat back down. By now he had little patience and he circled his answers so harshly he tore through the paper.

 

“I’m not asking for another damn paper,” he said, aloud, to himself. The clerk stared at him.

 

_ Do you feel less motivated and uninterested in your usual activities? _ Bruce snorted to himself and marked the question out. It wasn’t applicable. He marked out the next three questions—something about changes in appetite, thoughts of uselessness or guilt, nothing that applied to him—and stopped dead on question number five. 

 

_ Are you currently or have you ever had thoughts of suicide or self-harm? _

 

It was curious that shattering glass would sound like rain. Curiouser still, that a shard of glass would embed itself in Bruce’s cheek and feel like ice, and even curiouser that Bane’s footsteps sounded like thunder as he lumbered forward; all of the ingredients of a storm, here and now. Jason’s mask in his hand, the thunder rolling forward, the pain like fire, thinking,  _ let me see my son again. God, please let me see my son again.  _ And the savage hopelessness of being denied, again, again. Years before then, bleeding out on the kitchen floor, Alfred hands pressed around the gaping wound in his neck, the whispered  _ don’t you dare take him from me.  _

 

Bruce cracked the clipboard in half and threw it at the clerk. The clerk squealed like a mouse and ducked beneath the desk. “These are idiotic questions,” he said, stalking through the door.

 

The hot summer air outside did nothing for the burning rage in him, and he settled into the passengers’ seat, clipping the seatbelt with a click with more force than necessary.

 

“That was a quick appointment,” Alfred said, dryly. 

 

“They’re fools,” Bruce growled. “They ask unnecessary and poorly worded questions. We would do well to spend our money elsewhere.”

 

Alfred was silent for a moment, and it was a silence that made Bruce feel small and guilty. “I doubt they ask unnecessary questions,” he said, carefully.

 

“Well, they do, and we’re leaving.” 

 

Alfred gripped the steering wheel tightly. “Of course, sir, and where shall we go? A return trip to Zimbabwe? Another detour in Russia? Does Damian have an event important to him that we can miss in favor of causing ourselves bodily harm in the Himalayas? How wasteful can we be in Las Vegas, hm?”

 

“Shut up,” Bruce snarled. 

 

“No one has lied to you and left you laboring under the delusion that this would be easy. I am not leaving you to do this on your own. But it is  _ necessary. _ I have watched you on the brink of death for many, many reasons, almost all of them noble. But I will not watch this. I will not watch you die because of a treatable illness. You will go back into that building, and you will put up with all the indignity of honesty, and you will do so  _ today.” _

 

Bruce swallowed.  _ You will not take him from me. _ He hadn’t remembered Alfred saying that, his voice thick with tears, until today. He hadn’t remembered much—it had been his first time dying. Then he covered his face with his hands, muffling a groan. “How honest do I have to be.” 

 

A hand reached out and squeezed Bruce’s shoulder. “As completely as you can.” 

 

“I left you.” 

 

Alfred hummed in answer.   
  


“I left you. When I was training. And I never thought about how much that must have hurt until Dick left, but that’s not the same.” He didn’t try his hand at death, first, Bruce thought. “We still talked. Even to fight. I didn’t… we didn’t. Not for four years.”

 

Alfred’s hand dropped from Bruce’s shoulder. “I only knew you were alive because you were in the papers,” he said, quietly, staring at his lap. “Thank the heavens for those, because what would I have done if I thought you were dead, I do not know.”   
  


“I’m sorry,” Bruce said. “I—I don’t know what I was—”

 

“Hush, boy. You’ve been long forgiven. Don’t waste this newfound honesty on me, get back in there and talk to your doctor.”

 

Bruce nodded, hesitated, and then nodded again before pulling himself out of the car. He went inside, apologized to the clerk, and sat back down to stare at the goldfish painting. After three and a half minutes, he picked up the pen, went straight to question five, and circled  _ yes. _ Shame bore down on him, but for God’s sake, he circled yes, and he finished the damn paperwork, and then he finished the damn appointment. He felt raw and as if someone had taken a knife and cut his abdomen open, letting his guts slide out, but he finished the damn appointment.

 

When he got back to the car, Alfred put the car into reverse and turned to look over his shoulder; no wild congratulations, not even a change in expression. “Well?”

 

“Bipolar type one,” Bruce said, quietly. Dr. Meridian had given him a questionnaire—a couple, actually. He did not mention the look on her face when he described a few of the things he had done, in the past few weeks. 

 

The car pulled out of the parking lot. “The hardest part is upcoming, I fear,” Alfred said.

 

“What’s that?”

 

Alfred turned to look at him, briefly. “You have to be honest with those you care for.”

 

-

 

Clark followed him down to the Cave, after the League meeting. 

 

“It was nice to see you on the Tower, again,” he said, arms crossed, staring up at the dinosaur’s glinting teeth. “Y’know, Damian complains to Jon about this dinosaur all the time. He says it’s an inaccurate rendition. You wouldn’t have been able to see the holes in the skull reflected in T-Rex’s face, and that T-Rex had lips. Also the wrists are just all wrong.”

 

“Hn,” Bruce replied. He busied himself with cleaning up the folders Tim had left spread out on the Batcomputer’s console, binning an empty plastic cup from Taco Whiz. Damn kid. 

 

“I’m glad they get along now, he and Jon. They’re really mini-us’s. Damian grunts almost as much as you do. We’ve been seeing a lot of him, though.” 

 

Bruce toed a taco wrapper with his boot; Tim was going to be doing chores for Alfred for  _ weeks.  _ “I’m sure you thought that was a very graceful and unnoticeable way of lining up your question.”   
  


Clark turned and grinned at him. “Naw, I was giving you a chance to escape.”

 

“I’m taking it.”

 

Clark flew over to him, landing with a gentle dust of air in front of Bruce, looking entirely too proud of himself. “Too late. Chance gone.”

 

Bruce sighed and pulled off his cowl. He sat back in his chair with a whuff, and it creaked under his weight. “How much did Dick tell you?”

 

“How do you know he told me anything?”

 

“You’re usually a lot better about asking questions. But you’re unnerved. Someone told you something, and I’m betting it was Dick.”

 

Clark’s boots touched the ground. Good—Bruce hated it when Clark hovered over him. It was rather annoying. “I didn’t think my tells were that obvious.”

 

“This is my job, Clark.”

 

Clark leaned against the console, one leg crossed so his toe was resting on the ground, and asked, “So?”

 

Bruce turned his chair away from Clark with his heel, and booted up the computer, just to find something for his eyes to focus on that wasn’t that intense earnestness and the bright red-and-yellow shield on Clark’s chest. How many times had he been bleeding out, and that shield was the last thing he saw before he sunk into unconsciousness? “What did Dick tell you?”

 

“He said he had to fly out to Nepal and found you with a stab wound,” Clark said. “One you  _ asked _ for. He was pretty shaken up. Have you talked to him yet?”

 

The computer opened on a sheet of notes titled  _ Gorgonopsia. _ “Dammit, Damian,” Bruce muttered. “Do you know how much I have regretted allowing the kids to use this computer for casework? I have regretted it every day. Tim leaves a mess, and Damian uses it to copy down—notes on—whatever a gorgonopsid is. I can’t work like this.”

 

Clark chuckled.  _ “Gorgonopsia? _ He was telling me about those, at dinner the other night.”   
  


Bruce grit his teeth. In his head he saw Clark and Lois’s apartment, chicken casserole steaming on their dining table, soft yellow light framing big white smiles. Damian, sitting at that perfect scene with that perfect goddamn family, getting a taste of something he craved but would never get from his own family. Normalcy, peace—the promise of a father that wasn’t broken in key places. “I know I am a terrible father, but if you would stop telling me all about how you’re parenting my kid better than I am, that’d be swell,” Bruce snapped. 

 

“I didn’t say anything like that.”

 

“You didn’t have to. Get out of my cave.”

 

Clark grabbed the back of Bruce’s chair and swiveled it so Bruce was forced to look at Clark, in all his damn earnestness. “Bruce. I’ll leave if you want me to, but I wasn’t trying to say anything like that.”

 

Bruce stood up and brushed past him—a punching bag sounded pretty nice, about now. But then Clark jogged to catch up and reached out and grabbed Bruce on the shoulder, and Bruce snatched a steel pipe off of his workbench and broke it in half over Clark’s face. He didn’t relish the hit. It made him want to take the jagged end of the pipe and push it through his own stomach.

 

“Worth it?” Clark asked, expression cold.

 

“Always,” Bruce lied. “Get out of my house.”

 

Clark stopped, sucked in a breath with his eyes closed, and when his eyes fixed on Bruce again they were like chips of ice. But Superman held steady as Superman always did. “I think you’re trying to make me angry intentionally so you don’t have to admit anything’s wrong. And that’s not going to work.”

 

Bruce stiffened. “You look pretty angry to me.”

 

“I can be angry. But you still have to admit something’s wrong, because your kids are terrified for you, and they’re not going to stop being terrified until you let them know it’s okay not to be. And if you don’t do that, I will be angry with you in a way I never have been. Because you’d be hurting your kids for selfish, petty reasons.”

 

Bruce rubbed at his eyes. The anger seemed to flow out of him, like a boil that had been lanced—Clark had that effect. It was like a chorus of birds chirping in the morning, a man who could put anyone at ease. “You’re right.”

 

“Consider this a test run. Now you know how  _ not _ to have this conversation,” Clark said, with a note of humor in his voice. 

 

“Forgive me. For hitting you.”

 

Clark reached out and squeezed Bruce’s shoulder. “It tickled,” he said, with a smirk. 

 

Bruce raised the broken pipe in his hand. “I take it back. You can forgive me after I hit you again.”

 

Clark sat on the workbench, his feet braced on the actual bench, because Clark knew just precisely how to irritate Bruce, and when were the moments that Bruce couldn’t say anything and just had to put up with his nonsense. Bruce sat beside him, staring out across the Cave instead of looking at Clark, although he knew Clark was looking at him still. 

 

“I suppose I have bipolar disorder now,” Bruce said. 

 

“I’m not exactly surprised.”

 

Bruce turned his head to glare at Clark sharply. “What do you mean?”

 

“I mean that it runs in Lois’s family, and we’re concerned about Jon, so I’ve done a lot of research on it,” Clark said. “I know a thing or two. And it makes sense.”

 

“Runs in the family,” Bruce repeated. 

 

“This means, the conversations you’re about to have with your kids,” Clark said. “Damian’s got to have a different one.”

 

Bruce put his head in his hands. “I’m going to fuck this up.”

 

Clark bumped Bruce’s shoulder with his own. “You’re doing a pretty bang-up job so far, I think. It ain’t easy, but, well, what is?”

 

“Eating cake,” Bruce replied, automatically. “Laying down and doing nothing. Getting—”

 

Clark laughed. “Shuddup, you know what I meant. Are you on any medication, now?”

 

Bruce swallowed. “Yes,” he said, simply. He’d been instructed to up the dose, five days in, and now the side effects were starting to make themselves known; he hadn’t eaten anything but crackers, today, because of the nausea. And he felt torn between wanting to curl up and sleep for the rest of his life, and never sleeping again—like a bird that wasn’t ready to stop being forced to slow down. 

 

“How’s it going?”

 

“Something terrible,” Bruce replied. 

 

A arm came down around his shoulders, and pulled him close. “Thank you. For doing this. It’ll be better, promise.”

 

“I’m holding you to that.”

 

“Hopefully you’ll hit me with less pipes,” Clark said. 

 

Bruce shoved him.

 

“I get worried you might break something, time to time,” Clark said, smiling so broadly he looked like a ray of sunshine manifest.

 

“I’m about to,” Bruce grumbled. 

 

-

 

The days after that he spent mostly sleeping. It most likely had something to do with the risperidone, which was not a drug Bruce thought he would continue taking. The hours he was awake he felt dull and slow and sad in a bones-deep way that refused to be assuaged by even the best news. He was awake for a handful of hours, but that was only here and there, and he spent most of it in one of the sitting rooms towards the back of the Manor, far away from the kids’ rooms and the kitchens. But not far enough, apparently. 

 

“I found him,” Dick said. “I think? I mean, it’s a bunch of blankets, but it’s probably him. Yeah, I can do that.” 

 

Something rammed into Bruce’s side. “I’m awake,” he growled. 

 

“Aw, good morning, B. Here, Jason wants to talk to you.” 

 

When Bruce made no move to grab the phone, Dick tugged the fleece blanket off of Bruce and held the phone to his ear.  _ “Dickweed, did you give him the phone?” _

 

“I’m here, Jason.” 

 

_ “Fucking finally. I think he checked every room in that place. So, I had an idea. There’s a basketball game on tomorrow, and we should watch it. You missed the Knights game, now you’re subjected college basketball.” _

 

“Do you know anything about college basketball,” Bruce asked. 

 

_ “Fuck no, and you don’t either. I don’t know anything about basketball, period. I’m there for the food.”  _

 

Bruce snorted. “What food?”

 

_ “I’m sneaking in Pizza Hut through the window so Alfred doesn’t see.”  _

 

“You are truly living dangerously,” Bruce said. “Alright. I’ll be there.”   
  


_ “I wasn’t asking. I was demanding. Learn the difference.” _ And then the call cut off, leaving Bruce smiling against the the blanket pressed beneath his head. Briefly he thought of Jason’s warmth next to him, the two of them sitting side-by-side on the couch and, for once, just getting the chance to enjoy the other’s company. It would be a good day. 

After several minutes, Bruce thought Dick would get up and leave and return to whatever business he had at the Manor. Dick didn’t leave him, though. He sat down beside Bruce and said, “I won’t pretend to know what all that was about, but you look happy, so I won’t question it.” 

 

“Liar,” Bruce rumbled. 

 

“Liar? How?”

 

“You’re dying to know,” Bruce said. 

 

Dick flicked him on the ear, but he was smiling. “Shut up, you raised me to be curious. What did he want so bad he called me seven times to get it?”

 

“He wants to watch a basketball game.” 

 

“Asshole could’ve just called me back,” Dick muttered. “How’re you?”

 

“I was sleeping.”

 

Dick flicked him again. “That’s a nice change, I was beginning to think you actually didn’t need sleep after all. I haven’t seen you around, this where you been?”

 

“I was sleeping, and I would like to still be sleeping.”

 

Dick sputtered. “But I haven’t seen you! At least chat with me first.” Bruce glanced up at Dick and raised a brow. “Okay, fine, I’ll chat, you huff an’ puff,” he amended. 

 

_ The conversations you’re about to have with your kids, _ Clark had said. 

 

“I need to talk to you,” Bruce said, and his voice was muffled by the blanket. 

 

“You know, I always get scared when you say that, because those are your ‘you went and fucked up’ words, but you look so cozy right now I’m barely nervous. You can’t tell me off and be cozy, it’s against your code.” 

 

Bruce chuckled. “I have no such code.” 

 

“You do, you’ve just never used those words for it. C’mon, what’s up?” Dick asked. 

 

“I should apologize. For scaring you.” 

 

Dick was silent so long that Bruce reached out to grab his hand, to rub his thumb over his eldest’s knuckles, the rough scars that lived there. His son was a brave one; Nightwing always fought with collected confidence, no matter what he was going up against. Then Dick said, “I just want you to be okay,” in a soft, shaking voice.

 

“I am,” Bruce said, “getting there. We… there was… I saw. A doctor.”

 

Dick grinned. It was worn at the edges, but a grin nonetheless. “Full sentences. Try for full sentences, I know you can do it.” 

 

“You’re a brat.” 

 

Dick patted Bruce’s head with the hand Bruce wasn’t holding. “I’m your favorite brat. How’d the doctor go?”

 

He would just have to say it. He would just have to open his mouth, and say the words, and he would only have to say it once; he could say it the once, and then the proverbial ball was in Dick’s court. If Dick wanted to renounce him, if Dick wanted nothing to do with him, then that would be something that Bruce would learn to live with—but he would only have to say the words once.

 

“I have bipolar disorder,” he choked out. The truth did not free him. The truth, instead, terrified him immensely, and he watched every motion of Dick’s face, the quirk of the brow and the blink of the eyes and none of it said  _ I’m walking out of your life. _

 

Dick leaned down and pressed a kiss to Bruce’s cheek. “Color me not surprised,” he said. 

 

Bruce would swear his cheek was tingling where Dick had kissed it. “That’s what Clark said.” 

 

“We know you,” Dick said, simply. “I’m glad… you’re doing something about it. I’m glad—I’m just glad. There was a bit there when you wouldn’t, and, and I’m really glad we’re not there anymore.”

 

There was a thickness to Dick’s voice that shouldn’t have been there. Bruce pushed himself upright and when he looked at Dick, he was surprised to find Dick was covering his face, the way he did when he was about to cry. Bruce pulled Dick against his chest, resting his chin on Dick’s curly hair. Dick had never sat still long enough for Bruce to run a comb through it—it was something he and Jason had in common, across time, though they’d never know it.

 

“I missed you,” Dick mumbled, “when you were dead. I’m just happy that you’re—that you’re not, and that you’re healing up okay, and—Jesus, don’t ever ask someone to stab you again. I can’t lose you again.” 

 

“I’ll try,” Bruce said. 

 

Dick shifted so he was curled against Bruce’s chest. Bruce buried a hand in his hair, stroking through it and tugging all the tangles out. “I’ll try,” he repeated, and he meant it, deeply and truly. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

 

“Just don’t die and we’ll be alright,” Dick said. “The last time you did that, it… it was bad.”

 

Bruce tugged on a stubborn curl. It bounced like a spring. “I have no plans on leaving you.”

 

And it was finally, finally sweet to be honest. Dick leaned his head into Bruce’s neck, breathing long and slow. When he was a child, he used to lay his head over Bruce’s heart and listen for his heartbeat. What broke Bruce’s heart were the quiet sniffles and the wretched sobs that sometimes followed, the desperate  _ don’t fall don’t fall not you too.  _ Dick’s breath on his collarbone now reminded him of then, of the little boy who’d come to him broken-hearted and left big-hearted, and it was a mercy, a kindness, to be able to stay. 

 

“Good,” Dick said. “How’s the horse?”

 

“Presumably alive. I haven’t seen him since he got here.”

 

Dick snickered. “Poor Excelsior has a shitty horse grandfather.” 

 

Bruce tugged on a lock of Dick’s hair. “I’m not old, stop making me feel old.” 

 

“Whatever you tell yourself, gramps.” 

 

And it was sweet.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This one's a tad on the short side :(


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Last one!

He managed to get down to the kitchen, which was more difficult than it should have been. By the time he managed to slump in one of the chairs around the island he was far too exhausted to consider making a sandwich, or even to pull some leftovers from the fridge to eat cold. It’d been a while, since he’d last eaten, but he couldn’t remember how long—he had gauged it to be too long, judging by Alfred’s increasingly sharp remarks. It had taken an hour to screw up the energy to make it down the stairs, and he’d done it mostly so Alfred would stop looking at him quite like that. 

 

It took him a moment to realize he did not have the kitchen to himself. On the other side of the island, asleep beneath the granite countertop, stretched out on two chairs, was Tim. 

 

“Tim,” Bruce hissed.

 

Tim jerked some, but otherwise didn’t move. 

 

“Tim,” Bruce said again, louder. 

 

“Shut up, Bruce,” Tim mumbled. 

 

Bruce huffed a laugh that died somewhere between his throat and his teeth. “Hop up, son. Go sleep in an actual bed.”

 

Tim sat up, scrubbing at his eyes. “Is that a blanket?” he asked, voice sleepy and only half-audible. Bruce’s heart squeezed with fondness. Tim had always had the odd habit of preferring to sleep in the oddest of places; Alfred usually joked it was something Tim had picked up from Bruce himself.

 

Bruce wordlessly opened the blanket he had around his shoulders like a cape. Tim slid down and came around, pulled a chair close to Bruce’s side, and slipped in beneath the blanket. 

 

“I was cold,” he said, by way of explanation, as if he needed to explain anything.

 

Bruce pulled him closer, so Tim was only half-sitting in his chair, mostly leaning against Bruce’s chest. It’d been a while, since he’d last seen Tim; Tim was good at keeping busy, good at disappearing, when he wanted. Some remnant of his childhood, Bruce had assumed—Jay was a bit similar, in that regard.

 

“How are you,” Bruce grunted. 

 

“How are you,” Tim grunted back, in a painfully bad mimic of Bruce’s own voice. At least, Bruce hoped he didn’t sound like that.

 

“I asked you first.” 

 

Tim butted his head against Bruce’s chest. “Well, I’m currently annoyed, because I asked how you are, and you didn’t answer.” 

 

“I was planning on it,” Bruce said. He raised a hand to run through Tim’s hair, but his fingers caught on tangles, and Tim yelped. Bruce dropped his hand and poked him in the side. “Up, go get a comb.” 

 

“I don’t want to,” Tim whined. 

 

Bruce poked him again, more harshly this time. “Up, Timothy. If you’re going to have long hair it has to be well-kept, else you’ll have to cut it off.” 

 

“You’re just a neat-freak,” Tim said, but he did crawl out of the chair and stomp off through the kitchen doorway. 

 

Bruce dozed pleasantly until Tim returned, brandishing a comb. “Wet it in the sink,” Bruce ordered. 

 

Tim rolled his eyes. “Sir, yes sir! Can I brush your beard, now that you have one?” 

 

Bruce rubbed his chin absently. His palm was greeted by a thick layer of hair he’d failed to notice. “Hn,” he said. “If those tangles don’t break the comb. Sit on the floor.”

 

Tim handed him the wet comb and folded his legs beneath him, dropping to the floor with a quiet  _ whuff. _ “It’s been a while since you went out,” he said.

 

“I’ve been tired. Tilt your head forward, son.” 

 

Tim dipped his chin to his chest, so his voice was muffled when he said, “Are you okay?”

 

Bruce stopped. “Yes,” he said, after a long silence. “I am told I am experiencing the normal side effects of… this medication.” 

 

Tim clucked his tongue. “What is it?”

 

Bruce picked a lock of hair and pinched it an inch up, tugging the comb gently through the tangle beneath. “Risperdal. I take it for bipolar disorder.” 

 

“Oh,” Tim said. “Oh. Ah. I didn’t know that.” 

 

“Neither did I, until a month ago.” 

 

Tim hummed. “So that’s what was up, right? But you’d have to be bipolar all the time—oh, right. Okay. You make more sense now, no offense.” 

 

“I am not offended.” Bruce pulled the comb through without resistance a couple more times, and then pinched an inch higher, and started tugging on another knot. 

 

“Can I confess something,” Tim said. 

 

“Go ahead, son.” 

 

“I don’t know that much about bipolar disorder, so I’m gonna have to research it. And also I maybe like it when you call me that,” Tim said. The line of his shoulders was rigid, so Bruce leaned forward and kissed his head. 

 

Tim was quiet for a while—Bruce worked over the ends of his hair, and was now teasing out the knots closer to roots. “My dad used to call me that. The, uh, other one. But it doesn’t make me mad when you do. You say it… nicely. Like you care.”

 

Bruce closed his eyes and dreamed of breaking every single one of Jack Drake’s fingers. “I do,” he said, quietly. 

 

“Thanks. So I Googled bipolar disorder. There’s two types. Which one?” Tim asked. 

 

Bruce leaned over to peer at Tim’s phone. “One,” he said. He felt skinned, vulnerable; but it was worth it, to have this moment with his second-youngest.

 

“Oh. What’s it like?” Tim said. “Or, uh, that’s only if you… want to talk about it. I can read blog posts. I’m just, I don’t know, curious?”

 

“Like being tied to the nose of a fighter jet,” Bruce said. “But only sometimes.” 

 

Tim’s head bobbed. “Yeah. Ups and downs. Do you, uh, mind? If I read—articles, blog posts, the works.”

 

“No. No, I don’t, son.” 

 

What Bruce failed to mention was the curious and stabbing way his heart was beating now, the flood of nameless, wordless emotion. Skinned, vulnerable, but kindly so. 

 

Bruce finished with Tim’s hair and then ran his fingers through it for a while. Tim went boneless, sagging against Bruce’s leg until he was snoring softly, his phone still in his hand. After an hour, maybe two, when the sun was rising, Bruce bumped Tim’s shoulder with his knee. 

 

“Hop up, Tim,” he said. “It’s time for you to sleep in a real bed.” 

 

Tim made a sound that could only be described as a mewl and curled into Bruce’s leg. “I wanna stay,” he said. 

 

Bruce stood, bent over, and scooped Tim up. 

 

“Put me down,” Tim muttered. “I wanna sleep.” 

 

“You’re going to sleep. I’m taking you there.” 

 

But Tim only nuzzled into Bruce’s neck. Bruce finally got to Tim’s room, and eased him on the bed; Tim curled up immediately, wriggling until his head was hidden beneath the pillow. Bruce patted his shoulder and said, “Goodnight, son.”

 

“Good morning,” Tim corrected him. 

 

“Good morning, smartass.” 

 

Tim laughed, the sound blocked by the pillow, and Bruce settled in on the floor, where he waited until Tim’s breathing became low and slow. And then he waited longer, just to listen.

 

-

 

Hoofbeats thundered against the ground. A shrill whinny divided the sound, and over the curve of the hill, a golden-red horse galloped towards them, lean muscles pumping under a short summer coat, black tail flicking and batting at the air. Excelsior’s weight shifted to his front legs, and he kicked out at the sky, muddy hooves cutting up clumps of grass and dirt. Then they hit the ground and struck out, and Excelsior was off again, galloping hard down the line of the fence and tossing his head. 

 

“He saw a deer,” Damian explained, pointing down to the darkened treeline far across the pasture. Sure enough, something flickered briefly in the undergrowth, before disappearing. “They tend to scare him.”

 

Jason snickered and plucked the travel mug from Bruce’s folded hands. He took a deep drink and then held the mug away from him, sticking his tongue out in disgust. “Your coffee is cold,” he hissed. 

 

Bruce snatched it back. “I like it that way.” 

 

“No, no, no you don’t, you hate it that way,” Jason said. “I was raised by you, I think I know your coffee preferences. Black, as hot as possible. I once watched you drink an entire mug in one swallow.”

 

“Hn.”   
  


Jason thumped his shoulder. “That was the moment I decided you were my hero.”

 

“Hn,” Bruce repeated, but this time his heart had ached, like it’d been stabbed with a pin. It felt good, in a way. 

 

Damian hopped off of the fence he’d been sitting on. “I’m bringing Excelsior into the barn. It is late,” he said, and then he folded his hands over his mouth and made a sound like a diving hawk. Hooves pummeled the ground. Excelsior emerged around the bend, slowing to a trot and then a walk and then resting by Damian. Damian jumped the fence and took the bright blue lead line hung around his neck and clipped it to Excelsior’s breakaway halter, and with his back perfectly straight, he led Excelsior towards the rusted red gate of the paddock. 

 

“He’s a show-off, the little shit,” Jason said, after the two disappeared into the late shadow of the barn. Moments later, a warm yellow light flicked on, casting both the boy and his horse in deep blue shadow. “He’s been working hard with that trainer of his, to do that come-when-I-shriek-like-a-fuckin’-banshee trick.” 

 

“He’s doing well,” Bruce said. Something in his chest swelled; he’d thought, maybe, that the implications behind getting Damian a horse might upset him. It seemed he’d been worried for nothing. He was proud of his youngest, and proud to the marrow of his bones.

 

“He is,” Jason said. He grabbed Bruce’s mug again. He took a sip, and his grimace was less severe, this time. “You ready to give us a masterpiece?”   
  


Damian had brought them both out to the barn to help him paint the wooden sign Bruce had made for Excelsior’s stall—the horse’s name was burned into it, but then Damian had filled the letters in with black paint and insisted everyone in the family add to the sign. _ Excelsior is family, _ Damian had insisted. Yesterday he’d brought Tim and Dick down, the day before, Steph and Cass. Alfred had added a handprint that morning. 

 

“I did what you asked,” Bruce said, quietly. 

 

His second-oldest shrugged. “I don’t know, I think the last thing I asked you to do was fuck off an’ here you are, not fucking off.” 

 

Bruce snorted. “Some of us are trying to have a conversation, here, Jay.” 

 

Jason punched him in the shoulder. Even when playful Bruce could feel the leashed power there. “Shut the hell up, old man. You’ve never had a working conversation in your life.”

 

Bruce stared down at his trainers—he was still in a black jogging suit, just back from a ten mile run. He’d had to stop taking the risperidone; the half a month he’d been on it, he’d been capable of sleeping, and maybe occasionally eating, and not much else. He'd be starting something new, he was sure, after his next appointment. He was easing back into a normal workout schedule after cutting it, and he could tell from the aching soreness already curling up his muscles that he’d overdone it, today. But it was good, solid work. The kind of basic physicality he could be satisfied with, when it felt that, in every other dark corner of his life, he was stumbling forward like a fledgling with half-grown feathers. 

 

“I’m trying to right now,” he said. He just barely capped the urge to grit his teeth. The indignity of being a fledgling.

 

Jason was silent for a moment. He hummed, and said, “You’re gonna have to be less cryptic. What was it that I apparently asked you to do?”

 

“You asked me to… care. And I am… doing that.” 

 

Jason turned to look at him, cocked a brow. “Oh, really. Tell me. How’s that feel?”

 

Bruce grunted. “Like hell.”

 

Jason laughed lowly. “Glad to know you’re still you.”

 

_ Like taking off a bandaid, _ Bruce thought. “I’m bipolar,” he said, quickly. “That is—that was—the problem.”

 

Jason turned his head upwards, squinting at the setting sun, in all its brilliant pinks and oranges. “You look mildly inconvenienced. Like you just put salt in your coffee instead of sugar.”

 

“I am,” Bruce said. 

 

Mild inconvenience was an understatement, but it was a statement Bruce liked—he liked the shape of it, the form of it, the way it settled on the tongue and cut past the roof of the mouth. It was such a nice, gentle way of describing a pattern his brain had been hammered into for most of his life; such wonderful noise.

 

“I have advice for you,” Jason said. “And what’s hilarious to me is, you taught me this. Was one of the very first things you taught me, actually, about how to be a Robin. I told you I wasn’t good enough. I told you I was street trash. An’ you told me it doesn’t matter one single ass bit where I come from, but if I kept treating me as the problem, I wasn’t going to be Robin after all. I’d get in my own way. You, you’re getting in yours. It’s not a fuckin’ problem. You’re just you.” 

 

“I would argue that it is a problem.”

 

Jason huffed. “Remember when I was a kid, I ate so fast I threw up. And you had to give me dinner in half-portions, every half hour, until I got bit by the genius mosquito, gained a couple IQ points, and figured the fuck out that you weren’t about to take the food away from me. It got fixed. Problems get solved. People get treatment.”

 

Bruce furrowed his brow. “I don’t think—”

 

“Stop being so goddamn pissed you’re not the perfect Batman machine, and settle for being the best one,” Jason said. “It’s all over your face. You look like you swallowed a lemon. You’re bipolar. Sweet, now make your damn peace with it, ‘cause it’s not going away.”

 

Bruce swallowed hard. “Since when,” he struggled to say, “did all of you become wiser than me.” 

 

“Like I told you. You taught me that. You’re just a hypocrite who doesn’t practice what he preaches.” Jason reached out and patted his shoulder. “For what it’s worth, B, thanks for saying something. I mean, I’m totally sure Alfred made you. But thanks.” 

 

Bruce reached up and covered Jason’s hand with his own, rubbing a thumb across Jason’s scarred knuckles.

 

“Have you talked to Prince Of The Fucking Equines over there?” Jason jabbed a finger towards the barn. 

 

Bruce shook his head. “Tonight.” 

 

“How ‘bout I do it with you,” Jason said. He shifted his weight, leaning forward with his arms draped over the fence. “We Batman and Robin it?”

 

Bruce raised a brow. Jason was looking at him with an earnest, placid expression. After a breath of silence, Bruce said, “We Batman and Robin it.”

 

Jason grinned at him. The story of his lost son coming home was long and soaked in blood, and there had been no small amount of fighting; they’d shouted at each other until throats were raw, at times. As hard as it had been Bruce would have gladly lived through worse to see Jason smile like that. 

 

They headed out towards the barn in a peaceful silence, Bruce’s hand gripping Jason’s shoulder, the way he used to lead Jay-lad around when he was a foot shorter and maybe a hundred and twenty pounds lighter. 

 

Excelsior was nestled in his stall when they walked in, and Damian was scowling at the ceiling. “You’ll scare him!” he said, his nose scrunched in his indignation. 

 

Bruce’s eyes followed his to the barn rafters, where a familiar, dark shape crouched. Cass was wearing one of Bruce’s sweaters and another pair of his sweatpants—the dangling ends that draped over her hands and feet made her look a bit like a melted shadow. She held a finger to her lips; _ I’m being quiet.  _

 

Bruce froze. This was not the intended plan. Jason glanced at him and clapped his shoulder, and said, “Two on two. Hey! Get down from there, Gremlin Princess.”

 

Cass scuttled along the rafter beam and then slithered down the wall, hitting the floor in the empty stall next to Excelsior’s. Excelsior snorted and stamped a hoof. Cass ignored him and vaulted over the stall door, stooping down to scoop Damian up and swing him around.

 

_ “Cassandra!” _ Damian squeaked. “Release me at  _ once!”  _

 

Cass swung him around one more time and then dropped him in front of Excelsior;  _ here’s your boy back. _ Then her wiry arms were wrapped around Bruce’s stomach, squeezing hard. 

 

_ “Oof. _ Hello, Cass,” he said, stroking her hair. 

 

“Excelsior,” she said, “gets mad.”

 

Bruce chuckled. “You were the deer, weren’t you.” 

 

Cass smiled up at him. “No deer,” she said, eyes folded at the corners in such a way that she rather looked like a conniving, mischievous little imp. 

 

“Stop doing that,” Damian hissed. He brushed dust and hay off of his back furiously, and then reached up to pat Excelsior’s muzzle, as if to comfort him. “Father, tell Cassandra she’s not allowed to scare Excelsior.” 

 

“Only once in a while,” Bruce told her. 

 

Cass pinched her forefinger and thumb together and twisted them in the air beside her mouth, as if she were locking something;  _ our secret. _

 

Jason reached over and jabbed her in the head with his pointed finger. “Let him go, we have to create a masterpiece.”

 

Cass squeezed his middle again, and then her arms reluctantly fell away, but she leaned her head against his arm still. 

 

Damian had disappeared into the tackroom, and returned with a cup of water filled with brushes and a ceramic plate with a box of paint tubes balanced on top. He jerked his head to the sign nailed to Excelsior’s door, covered partially by a blue handprint, a searing red octopus, a purplish-gray thunderstorm, several butterflies, and  _ TIM _ painted at the bottom as bright as a school bus. “Do not be afraid to cover Drake’s abomination.” 

 

“Give me the red and the smallest paintbrush you’ve got,” Jason said, settling cross-legged directly in front of the sign. Excelsior, currently at the back of his stall with one hoof resting on the toe, flicked a lazy ear towards them. 

 

Bruce settled in near the corner of the sign with a grunt. Cass plopped down beside him, stretching out with her legs crossed and her head pressed against his thigh, and absently, Bruce ruffled her hair, rubbing circles into her scalp. “What should I paint.”

 

Jason turned from the globs of paint he was smearing on the wood. “You can’t ask for inspiration, that’s un-artistic. It has to strike you in the moment. That’s what real brilliance is, you prick.”

 

“Bat,” Cass answered. 

 

“Pass me the gray,” Bruce said. 

 

Damian handed him a two tubes, black and white. “You have to mix it,” he said. 

 

Bruce looked at him. “Mix it for me. A light gray and a darker gray.”

 

Damian’s responding glare was unimpressed, but he squeezed the paint onto the plate and began to swirl it around with a smaller brush. Bruce dipped his thumb into the black and then tilted Cass’s head until he could see her nose, and dabbed it with the paint.

 

“There’s our deer,” he said. 

 

“Your awful jokes are infecting my raw skill,” Jason said. This time his eyes didn’t leave the swath of red he was painting (which covered  _ TIM _ just slightly). “Fuck off with that.” But he leaned over to flick Bruce on the knee, and Bruce knew what that meant. He waited until Damian was done mixing the paint, and he had started in with a darker gray outline, anyway. 

 

“Alright,” he said, and that was the only word he managed for about half an hour of painting. By the time he spoke again, he’d started filling in with the lighter gray, and dabs of white here and there for lighting. Jason’s painting had taken the form of a pair of lips. 

 

Bruce washed off his brush in the cup, wiped the water on his pants, and then dipped into Jason’s pool of red. As he swiped it over the wood, he said, “Alright,” again. 

 

“You have to say words in order to say words,” Jason said. 

 

Bruce nodded, gulped. “Damian. Cassandra.”

 

He was given a, “Yes, Father?” and a poke to the chin in return. 

 

“I caused a scene. Recently. You should… know the one.” 

 

“I hit you,” Cass said, softly. 

 

Bruce poked her in the cheek with his paintbrush, leaving a splotch of red behind. “It’s fine. What I needed to say is, I have… discovered why.”

 

He glanced down at Cass, who blinked up at him with warm eyes. “I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder,” he said, very quietly, half-hoping neither of them would hear him. As it were, Damian went very still and looked at him oddly, and Cass squinted at him. 

 

“There are phases,” he explained, looking down at Cass. “Fast, and… slow, I would say.”

 

“Sometimes hummingbird,” Cass said. “Very fast. Sometimes vulture.” 

 

Bruce nodded. His throat felt tight and he could barely speak, but he managed to say, “Yes. Like that.” 

 

Cass poked him in the chin, again. 

 

“Fast and slow,” Damian repeated. 

 

Bruce nodded, tightly. It took him a few minutes to be able to say, “Can I have the yellow,” and when he did, Damian tripped rushing over, and Jason’s bellowing laugh sucked the tension out of the air. 

 

They finished not long after that, and stood back to survey the damage. 

 

“What is that, Jay,” Bruce asked. 

 

“A master does not reveal his secrets.” 

 

Bruce leaned over to look. “The lips. From  _ The Rocky Horror Picture Show.” _

 

Jason groaned. “Oh, fuck you. And you just had to show off with yours, huh, what the hell. C’mon, Gremlin Princess, I need you to hide behind the door and scare Alfred when I demand we make sugar cookies, and he tries to tell me no.”

 

Cass grinned and took his hand. Over her head, Jason met Bruce’s eyes, and jerked his head at Damian, who was still sitting with his back against the wall, looking like he was about to start shouting any minute. 

 

They left. Bruce stood there until he couldn’t hear their footsteps hit the dirt path any longer, and then he knelt in front of Damian, and lifted the boy’s chin to meet his gaze. 

 

“You’re angry,” Bruce said. 

 

“No,” Damian said. “I do not know. I do not… know what bipolar is, Father.” 

 

Bruce let his hand fall to cup one of Damian’s folded knees. “Let’s say that brains get sick the way bodies do.”

 

“Okay,” Damian said. His brow was still scrunched together, so Bruce leaned forward and, with his free hand, smoothed the wrinkle between them out with his thumb.

 

“It is hereditary,” Bruce said, slowly. “We’ll have to watch, for you. If you ever experience anything out of the ordinary, especially as you get older… Damian, son. Please do not hesitate to come to me. I made that mistake, and it was dangerous.”

 

Damian finally looked at him, but it was that wide-eyed, desperately young look; the look of a child, trying to find his father. “Out of the ordinary how?”

 

“You’d be reckless. Impulsive. There is… a deep sense that you are moving very quickly, and the world is not,” Bruce said. “And then, after that ends, you would feel exhausted. Sad. A deep sense that you are moving very slowly, but you don’t care how fast the world is going any longer.” 

 

“And I would have you,” Damian said, flatly. But it was a question all the same. 

 

Bruce squeezed his son’s knee. “Yes. You will always have me.”

 

Then he stood, and offered Damian a hand. With some reluctance Damian gripped it and Bruce pulled him up so he was carrying him, forearm braced under Damian’s thighs, and Damian’s arms around his neck. He was getting a bit too big, to be able to do this. 

 

“Why’d you paint a robin?” Damian asked. 

 

“Sometimes robins are smarter than bats. But only sometimes.”

 

Damian growled wordlessly, but he was smiling. “You mean always. Yours has spots.” 

 

“It’s a fledgling.” 

 

Then Bruce pulled the barn door shut, and carried Damian over the winding dirt path that led to home. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I had to ask someone if it was okay for Bruce to carry this many sons in one chapter
> 
> I hope you guys enjoyed it! Lmk if you have questions!

**Author's Note:**

> I hope you enjoyed!


End file.
